


aftermath

by esbis



Category: Noli Me Tangere & Related Works - José Rizal
Genre: 5+1 but it's a 4+1 of all the dead people in basilio's life, Angst, Canon character deaths, Gen, Moving On, Post-Canon, buti pa si basi naka-move on, ish, the tiago tag doesn't exist i'm A Pioneer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 07:13:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12030846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esbis/pseuds/esbis
Summary: A nightmare, an overdue visit, a white flower, and another nightmare.And a house by the sea.These days, he moves forward.(or, years later basilio is still haunted, but it's fine)





	aftermath

**Author's Note:**

> i can’t believe my first contribution to the fili fandom is just a bunch of stuff about dead people

It's peaceful out here.

Basilio doesn't like lingering by churches, but right here, right now, it's peaceful. He stands underneath the wide stone arc of the entrance, close enough to see how the dried wood cracks around the edges. There is no one else but him. Silence swathes over jagged spires and auburn shingles, intangible and yet, so off-putting. Something is wrong with how the leaves do not skitter under his feet, how the grass does not sway with the wind.

There is no wind, he realizes, vaguely; not a single thing moves.

Sparrows hang suspended in the sky, wide-winged shadows cast beside his own. The clouds remain the way they are, as unyielding tufts of beige, and the stained-glass windows do not budge from their half-opened slants.

It's like a photograph, a memory sealed in a single frame.

He finds that he himself can no longer move.

In the window across him, several meters up to the far right, a movement -- the first one he becomes aware of, something to disturbingly stark against the stillness of this strange pocket in time -- window flinging open, flakes of rust falling to the ground like ash. A figure leaps onto the ledge and throws itself out the window.

He is mute, and he is helpless, paper-like and frail.

She hurtles to the ground, stiff as a wooden doll.

He watches as the skirts billow with the fall, dark hair tangling behind her; she looks like a shroud cloaked in black and the fall seems to go on forever and ever and ever and ever even as his entire world tips on its axis underneath the solid cobblestone, he falls and she falls and

the silence is deafening. His world breaks apart when she crashes to the ground, a crumpled heap of broken neck and cracked nails. Around him, the sky tears itself apart and the santan flowers begin to drip with the color of her blood.

 

-

 

"Do you think they can hear those?"

There are tufts of grass and wildflowers growing from the cracks on the ground. Basilio keeps his eyes on the gravestone and brushes dirt from the engraved name. Santiago Delos Santos. The area is seldom visited; the grave is empty of any candles and other things, yet well kept.

"Hear what?"

"Our prayers."

He scans the rest of the cemetery, as if someone would have heard them. But it is only a dry August day, and the only people aside from him and the Delos Santos' old errand boy is a couple of children playing at the edge of a field. So he turns and says, "I don't know," because quite honestly, he doesn't.

The other hums and places his straw hat back on his head. Basilio barely notices when he stalks away, deliveries in tow. He works in the market now, perhaps, lugging fruit and meat from the fields all across town. 

He doesn't say he wasn't praying. Somewhere in the distance, the church bell tolls, and he quickly finishes his one-sided message. As difficult a patient the man proved to be, he had, after all, practically fathered him for over ten years -- for the shelter, the food, the education, and the strange sense of family, Basilio still comes by from time to time to give him thanks.

He imagines, for a moment, the portrait that hangs in the main salas: her kind smile, the golden comb and sampaguitas wreathed in her hair, the gentle hands. Basilio had never met her, but sometimes, he would keep her in mind when dealing with the old man was especially difficult.

He hopes the Capitan is with his daughter now.

It isn't much later when he finally turns to leave, walking carefully between the graves. 

The sun is setting in the gray sky, and in distance, Doña Isabel approaches, a basket of flowers for the grave in her arms. 

 

-

 

One of his patients was the daughter of a botanist, so young and so unused to the climate. Her room was bright and airy, with pots of colorful flowers dripping from the windowsill. It was almost endearing how many plants had made their way into almost every nook in the little room. From the window, there was the makeshift greenhouse with gleaming windows and stone walls, where the father had invited him once to talk about medicinal herbs.

There was one flower that he had remembered, back in the study. A clean, fresh white flower with a burst of yellow in the middle, like a star. _Narcissus_ , the card on its pot read.

By the time the illness had gone and the young girl was running around the house again, he had a pot of narcissus flowers to bring home. Three pure white flowers, bending gently on their stalks. Basilio was no stranger to gifts such as meats, fruits, and vegetables from patients in more obscure barrios, offerings picked right from trees and endless green fields, but a flower was new.

He keeps it in the middle of his desk, the pot cradled gently between two stacks of books; her rosary, he drapes before it. 

He wonders if his mother is watching.

Sometimes, he thinks, she is. Sometimes there’s a laughter that drifts on a December breeze, soft and worn like laughter lines; sometimes the bed is neater after an entire night of studying, or a mirage of a wild mane of curly hair fades into a crowd, or the rosary is warm and the wood feels like loving, calloused hands. 

Sometimes, he thinks.

Only sometimes.

He stands at her grave on a normal afternoon a few days before Christmas. No one notices a man who forgoes the dirt path and disappears into the tall grass and foliage, who wanders right into the forest and into the gray-greens when the world is bathed in gold and illuminated colors. He tells her his stories and sits still beside the modest burial site when he runs out of words, waiting for the dapples sunlight to fade into the shadows and edge of town to light up with parols, one by one.

(as it has the past few years, there is no interruption to his visit. no shovel upturning another grave behind the trees, no lamp, no dark glasses, no one with him anymore. 

he should be relieved.)

He starts walking back to town, not in the least bit fazed that he had spent yet another day sitting by a grave with no one to hear his words. It’s only something he did, and still does. She doesn’t like staying behind, too.

When he gets home, the bed is warmer and his window is alight with neighbors’ parols, multicolored stars in the background framing the narcissus flowers on his desk.

 

-

 

He didn’t have enough time with his brother to be very close to him, but still, his brother is the first one he lost, and maybe the image of bruised wrists and white-hot tears appear in his nightmares more than they should for someone who he cannot even remember as more than a distorted phantasm.

Always screaming. Always crying. 

There has to be some other memory in there, but Basilio has spent well over ten years wracking his brain for the image of a young boy -- sleeping like the cherubim that rest over the church pews, clinging to their mother’s skirt, splashing around a clear blue river -- anything else. 

Maybe what stands out is that he could have saved him. Maybe. Probably not. 

Basilio had little time in his childhood to dream about being a hero, but the thought that he could have saved him had kept him up several nights for years afterwards -- but what could he do? The thought of a nine year old taking down the cloaked demons that passed for priests was laughable.

(if he had grabbed him and run, if he had begged for forgiveness hard enough, would they have been able to make it, or would they have died under a hail of bullets in the middle of a dark field all the same?)

In this dream he’s standing breathless and cramped, the smell of old metal rising from his confines, shadows only barely concealing the ancient bronze. A bell. He scrapes his hands on chipped, bubbled metal and drops to his knees to escape from underneath it because he knows where it’s going, it’s the same every single goddamn time and he never fails to hurt -- Crispin starts screaming, his voice high and breaking over the guttural Spanish that rakes right into stone walls, wooden floors, battered young skin. The sounds come from inside the bell, echoing back at him a thousand million times again and again to tear right through his cranium, sear across the side of his head like a bullet streaking through the night.

The screams taper off into nothingness until Basilio himself starts to feel his own screaming, searing through his throat like shards. He screams until the shadows start lashing out against the floor, until the blood has seeped into the cracks.

Until the priest says, “that’s enough,” and the world seems to take a moment to slow down, pick up the broken pieces and rearrange itself.

He’s curled up under the bell, cheeks stained with salt and copper.

_That’s enough._

The bell tolls once, twice, thrice, clanging around his unmoving body like bombs until he finally wakes up again.

 

-

 

“Another one?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Do you still want to go back to sleep?”

“I don’t know,” he whispers.

Predictably, he doesn’t end up sleeping again. Basilio looks back at the footprints he’s tracked on the cool sand, just out of reach of the lapping tides, trailing all the way back to the house at the end of the beach. Here he breathes in salt and cold and clouds, waits for the beginnings of a pale sunrise begin to bleed into the dark horizon. 

Fray Florentino told him to leave all his troubling thoughts at the shore and let the waves carry them over into nothingness, once. So he does, and watches the sea pull in and out, in and out, trying to see all the bad things disintegrate like foam.

 

The last one he lost should have been his best friend.

He should have lost him the moment he stopped talking and turned around to walk away, unable to look at eyes glazed over with a devotion for someone who didn’t deserve it. He should have lost him the moment Isagani ran into the house and jumped into a river with a bomb in his arms, and then was never heard from again for months.

 _Could have,_ he reminds himself, _could have lost._

Even if should have sounded more apt, like it was only a matter of time he lost another one, like everyone that had ever mattered were destined to leave him behind again.

But he tries not to think like it anymore. He’s lived thirteen years with the death of his immediate family haunting the back of his mind before having old wounds torn open again after Juli and the Capitan, and then, for a while, Isagani -- but he moves forward, like he always has, like he always will. People tell him he has strong, steady hands and they’re right when he stitches another’s gaping wound right back up -- it’s his job, he’s a doctor -- they’re right when he sews his own heart back together for the nth time in his life, hands wavering only ever slightly with each little patch.

And Isagani helps. He will wake up in the bed across the room moments after he does, in the dead of the night or in the early morning. For a while, when he spoke, it always sounded like _i’m sorry_ , but now all he hears is _i’m here_. 

Isagani, these days, he pores over cases but still finds time to wax poetic late into the night. Their country is still not free, and they are no longer reckless students, but he is still a dreamer. Basilio sits with him through a hundred sunrises, remembering the words of a dying man. 

It’s a welcome change, he thinks, moving forward like this. He still lives in town, alone, but the weekly visits he makes to Fray Florentino and Isagani make it worth it. 

(as many things are: the gratitude in the eyes of a patient’s mother or son or wife, the open arms that little family by the sea greets him with, the little things he discovers, like how isagani is eloquent anytime but the dead of the night and the little books he wrote as a child, all diligently binded by his uncle)

The nightmares still come, and he still visits graves, and he still talks to empty air, and the narcissus flowers he was given by a sick girl’s father had withered away years ago. 

But Doña Isabel and his old professors greet him in the streets when he visits these days, and his breath doesn’t come short after too long in church anymore, and he buys a garland from each sacristan that offers them until his door is soaked in the sharp, rich smell of sampaguita.

He visits the dead and heals the sick, and when he nurses another old man or comforts a mother or calms a crying child, he thinks, _i do this for them_. He lives his life to care and be cared for and knows that no matter how far he wanders, a little version of home will be waiting for him at the end of the shore.

He moves forward. These days, the sun shines a little brighter.

**Author's Note:**

> i haven’t written in so long lol jfc i’m sorry
> 
> also, originally, i was going to make one for basilio thinking about/visiting simoun too! but i remembered there was a scene of that already in [Ang Tugon ng mga Alon](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10097765/chapters/22493684) (which i love sm and honestly consider pretty much canon. makamisa? idk her) 
> 
> thank you for reading! yell at me on [twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/devalierite), i make fili fanart too


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